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It's the oldest trick in marketing: If you're selling new and scary, give it a familiar, reassuring face.

And so it is that when the Detroit QLINE begins accepting passengers three weeks from Friday, the voice gently reminding passengers when they've reached their destination will be that of longtime WDIV-TV anchor Carmen Harlan, who recently retired from the city's NBC affiliate after a career spanning nearly four decades.

Other cities have used local celebrities to command the attention of public transit riders. (In New York City, famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who famously left his $2.5-million instrument behind when he rushed from a Manhattan taxi to a solo performance gig, now can be heard cautioning other cab passengers not to repeat his mistake.)

But Harlan's stop announcements will be at once more and less than the audio cameo appearances made by celebrities elsewhere. After decades helming the Channel 4 news with a succession of male co-anchors, she is among the dwindling number of metro Detroit celebrities whose voices conjure their owner's names without conscious thought. Filter out those who are either deceased (RIP, Ernie Harwell and J.P. McCarthy) or burdened with controversial associations (sorry, L. Brooks Patterson and Geoffrey Fieger), and it is easy to understand why Harlan was QLINE executive Sommer Woods' first call.

A QLine streetcar makes its way on Woodward Avenue through Campus Martius in Detroit in December.(Photo: Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press)

The distinctive qualities of the human voice are undervalued in our Snapchat age, but if they are something to which public transit systems have paid a lot of attention, and with good reason. We hear our mother's voices before we ever see their faces; in the anomie of a streetcar or subway station, there's no substitute for the primal reassurance of a familiar voice, especially a female one.

The Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority sponsored a district-wide competition before tapping occasional transit rider Randi Miller to announce when the doors on its Metro cars are about to open or close. Chicago chose Lee Crooks, a professional voiceover artist who studied the announcements on Walt Disney World's Monorail before auditioning for the job. And in Minneapolis, operatic soloist Kathleen Humphrey prompts Twin Cities passengers with a voice her employer describes as "warm, sort of neutral, authoritative, calm [and] assuring."

San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system decided the task of disseminating critical information to its cosmopolitan ridership was too important to leave to human beings. So BART charged its software engineers to synthesize the voices of George and Gracie, the cheerful but ultimately soulless digital duo who tell San Franciscans where to get off and when to get back. ("The announcements alternate between the male and female voices on odd- and even- numbered platforms," a BART news release explains.)

Blech. Excuse us while we make digital audio sequences that simulate the sound of retching.

We get all the synthesized imposturing we can stand every time we call our cable provider or bank. George and Gracie may be the sound of the future, but Carmen reminds us that no matter where our stop may be, we can't be anywhere but Detroit.